truth?
‘I didn’t come back because you weren’t Italian.’
Her mouth fell open. But no words came out.
‘I promised my father on his deathbed that when I married I would marry an Italian girl.’
‘You have to be kidding,’ she blurted out.
‘Unfortunately, no.’ He knew only too well that he had been afraid that if he came back to Jordan he would forget his promise and marry her.
She shook her head at him, her eyes dropping limply to her sides. ‘And have you?’ she asked in a dull, flat voice. ‘Married an Italian girl?’
‘You think I would lie about something like that?’
‘I have no idea what you would lie about, Gino. I don’t know you. I never did. The man I lived with—and fell in love with—wasn’t real. He was a pretend man. A fantasy lover. The real Gino is a stranger to me. So I’m asking you again. Are you married?’
‘I told you. I’m not married.’
‘But you do have a girlfriend, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he bit out. ‘I do.’
‘So you’re a cheat as well as a liar!’
Gino sucked in sharply. No one had spoken to him like this in his whole life.
His shock deepened when she suddenly unsashed her robe and pushed it back off her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor. For a long moment she stood there, totally naked, her chin tipped up as she watched him devour every beautiful inch of her.
When his flesh automatically responded, Gino’s fingers tightened defensively around his wine glass. He didn’t know what she was up to, but he suspected that if he made any move to touch her she would scream the place down.
‘You like what you see, Gino?’ she said at last, in a challenging fashion.
Gino’s teeth clenched down hard in his jaw. The Jordan he’d known ten years ago had never been a bitch. The Jordan standing before him now was doing a very good imitation of one.
Perversely, it made him want her all the more.
‘Take a good long look, because you’re never going to see me like this again. Not that you’d overly care,’ she went on savagely, as she moved over to snatch up her clothes. ‘You’ll fly home to your girlfriend and you won’t give this little interlude a second thought. You won’t even feel guilty.’
She couldn’t have been more wrong. He’d never be able to put tonight—or her—out of his mind. And guilt was going to be his constant companion from now on.
As for Claudia…Gino could see that he would have to break off their relationship. She was a very nice girl, but she wanted to get married.
After this, marriage was permanently off Gino’s agenda. If he couldn’t marry Jordan, then he wouldn’t marry anyone.
In an amazingly short period of time Jordan was fully dressed, looking exactly as she had when he’d first seen her tonight. Except for her hair. As she hooked her bag over her shoulder she tossed her head at him, flicking her hair back from her face.
‘I never forgot you, you know,’ she threw at him. ‘Never. A girlfriend of mine said it was because you were unfinished business. She said it was a pity I couldn’t look you up, so that I could see you weren’t as fantastic as I thought you were. And she was right. You’re not. Oh, you’re still great at sex—I’ll give you that. You know exactly how to turn a girl on. But that’s a small talent in the wider scheme of things. I want a man who knows what he wants and goes after it. Who doesn’t let anything stand in his way. You’re obviously not that kind of man.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know,’ she said, with a curl of her top lip. ‘Actions speak a lot louder than words, Gino.’
‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he said as she headed for the door.
She reached for the doorknob, then stopped to cast a cold glance over her shoulder. ‘No, I’m ending a big mistake. You’re finished business now,’ she said, then wrenched open the door. ‘Ciao.’
JORDAN managed to make it home without shedding a tear. Pride prevented her from breaking down in the hotel, or during the taxi ride home. But the moment she was alone, with her door safely locked behind her, everything came crashing in around her.
Her legs suddenly buckled and she sank to the floor where she stood. Her knees hit the tiled foyer first, and her cry was not one of physical pain but of emotional distress.
‘Oh, Gino,’ she sobbed as her head tipped forward into her hands.
And there she stayed, as if she was in prayer.
But she wasn’t praying, she was weeping. And despairing.
For there were no illusions left for her now.
All these years she’d thought that her memory of Gino had been spoiling her relationships with men. And maybe that was true. But it had been a bittersweet memory, because she’d always believed Gino had loved her.
But he hadn’t loved her. He’d merely wanted her, the way he’d wanted her tonight. Not for anything lasting, just for sex.
That discovery had been bad enough. Finding out that his whole persona had been an illusion was even worse. He wasn’t some struggling Italian immigrant, trying to make a good life for himself through hard work. He was a silver-tail, slumming it for a while up here in Sydney. Roughing it—with her.
Tonight had just been a shorter version of what he’d done ten years ago.
Okay, so he probably had been going to change his flight till Sunday. But his motive had still been totally selfish. After all, why look a gift-horse in the mouth?
And, brother, what a gift-horse she was where he was concerned. Fifteen miserable minutes and she’d been up there in his room, ready and willing to take her clothes off. Ready for just about anything.
If she hadn’t found that plane ticket he would have had his wicked way with her for the whole weekend, then flown off back to Melbourne, to his real life and his real girlfriend.
Thinking about that had Jordan sitting back on her heels and wiping the tears from the cheeks. What on earth was she doing, crying over such a man? He was a bastard through and through.
Scooping in a gathering breath, Jordan got to her feet and walked quickly to her bedroom. No more was she going to let Gino Betolli spoil things for her. No more. When Chad rang her in the morning she would accept his proposal of marriage, and she would do her level best not to think of Gino ever again.
But such resolves were easy to make, Jordan came to realise, once she’d stripped off and stepped into
